Empires: Infiltration

by Gavin Deas

Genres: Science Fiction; Alien Contact; Space Opera

Synopsis

This groundbreaking collaboration between two Gollancz authors tells of the invasion of Earth by two different alien races - at the same time. Two men become aware of the threat, and must work to sabotage the invasion plans and see off the aliens. Each book follows one hero, uncovering the threat to humanity and the world from their point of view. Each book can be read on its own, and will give the reader a complete, kinetic, fast-paced military SF story. But read both books and the reader gets something else - another view of (some of) the same events and crossover points, culminating in a bloody battle at Canary Wharf. The two books can be read in any order, but together they tell the story of humanity caught in the crossfire between two deadly alien races, who have made Earth their battleground...

Release date: November 20, 2014

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 320

Sample

Weft Prime, Mid-Fifteenth Century

The Pleasure Mindship just appeared in Weft space. It was less than five light minutes from the planet. The Weft name for the planet was a complex excretion of fermions. The Pleasure knew it, simply, as Weft Prime.

The Mindship was already reconfiguring as it returned to normal space-time. It went from looking not unlike an iridescent conch shell to a shape that suggested insects and drills. It was an altogether more war-like shape. They had arrived this far out because they had detected the presence of a significantly-sized nickel-iron-cored asteroid family that could provide them with the raw materials they required. It had the secondary benefit of giving Weft Prime at least twenty minutes warning. Twenty minutes to contemplate the error and futility of resistance. Twenty minutes to live in fear and wonder at their punishment.

The main asteroid in the trinary family was a monster, a little over five hundred kilometres in diameter. The Mindship mated itself to the asteroid. It began to infuse the basalt crust with picotech; the atom-sized machines permeated the olivine mantle all the way to the core and began to rework the structure of the matter at atomic and molecular levels. The Mindship sank into the rapidly transforming asteroid.

Missile-shaped growths sprouted from the rapidly transforming matter and launched themselves at the two ‘moons’ that made up the remaining bodies of the asteroid family. The other rocks were significantly smaller, the largest having a diameter of no more than twelve kilometres. The missiles disintegrated as they impacted, seeding the two smaller asteroids with uncountable picotech machines. The machines immediately began to transform the matter of the ‘moons’ as well, fuelled by mining the latent background energy of the universe. It was the same fuel that powered all Pleasure technology.

Massive sub-light engines grew from the rocks and burst into life as they began their rapid acceleration to .5 light speed. Meanwhile, the main-body asteroid continued its transformation to a massive modular capital ship, growing weapon arrays and batteries, drone craft and autonomous intelligent missile systems. The Pleasure was capable of much more advanced technology but the thing about punitive expeditions was that the victims had to understand what was happening to them. In terms of technology, there had to be a common reference point.

*

The sub-light engines had continued growing out of the transformed war craft on nacelles. At the end of the nacelles the engines turned at one hundred and eighty degrees, reversing their thrust, bringing the massive capital ship down to a manageable combat speed. Or rather, a combat speed manageable for the main body of the Weft Prime main system fleet that was accelerating towards them. They were currently one light minute from the planet.

Transmit the inevitable destruction of their fleet to the planet? the Face wondered, aiming the question at the Enforcer.

There were only the two of them; there were only ever two of them. Their transformations had been complete moments after the ship had finished riding the wave of contracting and expanding space and emerged from the protective warp bubble generated by the ship’s monstrous mind. They had shifted from their protean form, required for their previous expedition, and into the form of primal Weft. Their new forms, like all their forms, had been designed to engender awe in the subjugated aliens. They could never, however, mimic the complex exotic matter and entangled quantum states of the Weft’s shadow-selves. Some races the Weft had encountered had come to think of the shadow part of the aliens as their ‘souls’, though the Weft themselves scoffed at such mysticism. Their only god was cold hard maths. It was, however, this shadow-self, this somehow natural link to the universe itself, that was causing the problem – from the Pleasure’s perspective, anyway. The narcotics that the Pleasure had introduced and then dealt to the Weft resulted in the addict being separated from, and the eventual death of, their shadow-selves. Soul destruction. The Weft had fought back.

The Weft were a tall, almost spindly, humanoid race with leathery skin. They made some of the other races they had encountered, in their explorations of the surrounding star systems, nervous. Mostly because of the way that the air behind them seemed to shift of its own accord. Their fixed rictus grins, a peculiarity of the physical composition of their cadaverous faces, didn’t help either. When a Weft communicated verbally, they did so through gritted teeth.

The Enforcer nodded in answer to the Face’s enquiry. He looked like one of the Weft, only larger and much more powerfully built: a warlike proto-Weft from a semi-mythic past. In as much as the Weft had a mythic past. They would prefer to think of it as a not yet-fully-understood past.

I still think that planetary destruction will send a message to any other recalcitrant systems, the Enforcer thought.

The Face mused that Enforcers always thought that planetary destruction was the way forward. A physical form had been more difficult for the Face. Faces normally chose to look like the idealised form of beauty for any given race they were in contact with. The closest the Weft had to a concept of beauty was a mathematic ideal of proportion and distribution of facial features. The Face, however, couldn’t see it. To his mind he looked the same as every other Weft.

What recalcitrant systems? the Face enquired. Everyone loves us, we give them what they want. That’s the whole point.

***

From the Weft Fleet’s perspective it must have looked like the three transformed asteroid warships had just exploded as they launched drone crafts and missiles. Each craft or weapon was a tiny pinprick of light against the backdrop of space and the distant pale light of the K-type main-sequence star.

A few moments later the Weft fleet reciprocated. In time measurement, there hadn’t been much of a delay – but in distance it would be telling.

Oddly tranquil, the Face thought. It was a private thought. A skin derm snaked up from the now Weft-like tech of the Mindship. The Face had made the ship synthesise what he felt would be the most appropriate narcotic for the one-sided battle. He wanted to enjoy the beauty of it. He knew the Enforcer would be taking something altogether more savage.

Then the missiles and drones met. Space lit up. The Face was overcome by it all as the custom narcotic took effect. A tear rolled out of one of his eyes.

Music. We must have music.

Drones attempted to intercept missiles, which in turn blossomed into hundreds of sub-munitions. Beams of light connected the fast-moving unmanned craft to tiny explosions, as their AI systems predictively targeted where the sub-munitions would be after the tiny amount of time it took the lasers to reach their targets.

It was one-sided. The Pleasure weapons were faster, smarter and more durable. They quickly reduced the Weft’s drones and missiles to a fast moving debris field and the majority of the Pleasure’s sub-munitions continued towards the Weft fleet.

With a thought, the Enforcer triggered another barrage of missiles and launched another flight of drones from all three craft. The two smaller satellite ships in their mini-fleet lost sufficient mass for them to visibly shrink as matter was transformed into the new drone craft and munitions.

By now the Pleasure’s initial barrage was in range of the Weft fleet. The light from the fleet’s point defence batteries seemed to reach out slowly for the sub-munitions. The AI systems on the sub-munitions used chaos manoeuvring to counteract the Weft’s predictive aiming. The light of their engines created fractal patterns with their erratic manoeuvring.

As they closed with the Weft, more and more of them were taken out by laser or railgun defence systems, and missile-based scatter-shot countermeasures. Some of the missiles made it through. Light blossomed as fusion warheads detonated against armoured hulls. Some of the smaller craft started to come apart but the cruisers, battleships and carrier ships were more than capable of withstanding the damage.

The slower, remaining sub-munitions and drones launched by the Weft – the few which had made it through the countermeasures – closed with the three Pleasure craft. The mass of each craft diminished again as they launched a protective cordon of satellites grown from their hardened hulls. Their predictive targeting was more than a match for the on-board AIs of the Weft weapons. Light stabbed out and the Weft missiles and drones ceased to be. There were tiny explosions against the hull of the Pleasure ships as they flew through the debris fields. A few of the sub-munitions made it through, or rather were allowed through; neither of the Pleasure operatives wanted the Weft to understand just how one-sided the fight was just yet. They might give up, and that would make the footage less interesting. Even now they were transmitting to Weft Prime on a carrier wave designed to hack the security of the Weft infoscape and transmit what was happening to every comms device on the planet and in orbit. Weft Prime would start receiving a minute after the initial contact had begun.

They’re not using much in the way of tactics, the Face commented.

What could they do? They know we have the technological advantage. We’re only three ships and they have to close with us as quickly as possible. Our superior speed means that we would be long gone before they could manage to manoeuvre into any kind of advantageous position, the Enforcer answered.

We don’t seem to be using much in the way of tactics either.

The Face picked up on a feeling of irritation from the Enforcer. The feeling had the context of a person of violence exasperated with the lack of knowledge of a gentler soul.

We don’t need to. This is a demonstration of power. We should give away as little information on our true potential as possible. As the Enforcer thought this, arrays were growing from each of the three craft. The arrays would require even more power than the energy weapons, even more than the initial transformation of the raw matter of the asteroids into combat-capable spacecraft.

Predictably, the Pleasure’s weapons were in range first. Space warped and burnt as focused particle beams and fusion lances reached across the distance between the two fleets. The weapons fired with rapidity and incredible accuracy. They were slaved to the ship’s powerful mind. The particle beams and fusion lances weren’t aiming to pierce the hulls, though they often did, or to take out the enemy craft’s engines. They were making a hole. Fire, reacquire and fire again. Point defence system after point defence system went down as the Pleasure ships’ barrage whittled away at the Weft fleet’s defences. They left the fleet’s main weapons, however, untouched.

The Weft fired their ship-long, cold-fusion reactor-fed laser cannons, their plasma-firing sun lances and their own, less powerful, focused particle-beam weapons. With a thought the Enforcer switched on the array. Had any been close enough to see, their perception of the ships would have warped, an optical illusion caused by the ships being enveloped in a protective energy shield.

The Weft’s beam weapons hit. Light, particles and plasma fire played across the shields in a complex visual display reaching into many spectrums. The Pleasure ships flew through the firestorm unscathed.

Then the Pleasure’s second barrage of sub-munitions and fast moving drone craft hit the considerably less well-defended Weft fleet. Hulls were ruptured by the force of fusion explosions. Others fell apart, victims of matter de-cohesion warheads.

I’m going to take out their orbital defences, the Enforcer thought. The Face nodded absently.

They had been receiving constantly updated information from their planetary scans for the last eight minutes. They had enough information for the ship’s mind to predict where the orbital defences would be by the time their munitions reached them. Half a metre thick, by two metres long, pointed rods of hardened, molecularly-bonded diamond, the munitions left the mass driver racks at .7 light speed. They had to be careful about what they aimed at. They could skim and even pierce the atmosphere but, if a sufficient amount hit the planet itself, this demonstration would become an extinction level event.

The Weft fleet was now, mostly, a rapidly expanding debris field still moving at its original velocity. The Enforcer gave the Mindship the order to finish off any surviving craft almost as an afterthought. Lightning played across the energy shields as debris from the Weft fleet impacted against them.

We must always look as gods, the Face thought.

The ships accelerated to .5 light speed again. It would take them less than two minutes to reach Weft Prime now.

*

The first the crews of the orbital defence platforms knew of the attack was when footage of the one-sided fleet engagement overwhelmed their comms net. They barely had time to register the incoming mass-driven hardened diamond rods before they impacted in a ring around the planet. Multiple hits at such speed all but disintegrated the weapons platforms. The Enforcer had been careful to program the ship not to fire on any platform over the planet itself but the rods skimmed across, or in some cases just through, the atmosphere on the dayside of the planet to hit platforms on the nightside. The few Weft remaining on the surface of the planet were treated to the view of the sky catching fire from multiple entries.

Just over twelve seconds later the three Pleasure ships slowed to combat speed. The two unmanned asteroid craft separated from the capital ship, heading towards the planet’s two polar horizons. The capital ship further reduced its mass by launching more missiles and drone craft. Then it commenced firing its energy weapons. The night side of the planet lit up from missile contrails, interception and drone craft engines and energy weapons fire as the Weft responded. It was over in moments. Erratic sub-munitions and beam weapons took out platform after platform, while countermeasures and point defence systems destroyed the Weft’s return fire. The shields took care of the energy weapons fire and whatever sub-munitions got through their defences.

On the nightside of the planet the two smaller, unmanned Pleasure ships were completing their planetary pincer movement. They were significantly reduced in mass as they erred on the side of overkill, launching more drones and missiles than they could ever possibly need. Then they too raised shields, and began firing their energy weapons as the return fire washed across their protective fields. In moments the planet was rendered defenceless.

How many, the Enforcer asked?

The Face gave it some thought. This saddened him. If having a ‘soul’ was better than what the Pleasure offered then so many of the Weft wouldn’t have turned to their wares. And for what, he thought privately? A life of toil masquerading as a race-wide effort at exploration and scientific research.

The Face checked with the ship’s mind. They had uploaded all the data that existed on the planet. This included accurate population census information.

Decimate them, the Face suggested.

The Enforcer started loading target information on a tenth of the population to the smart, seeker munition templates as they grew from the ship’s hull.

***

His name had once been a complex particle excretion. That was back when he’d had a shadow self. Back when the higher part of him had been intrinsically linked to existence. Back when he could hear the background music of the universe. Now that was gone. Once the most promising physicist of his generation, he was now little more than half a person, an animal in the eyes of his peers. Now they had to address him verbally, or he needed a particle translator to understand them. Now they simply called him Dal because they needed to make a noise to get his attention.

Addiction should have been the end of his career. The narcotics provided by the Pleasure had caused his shadow self to rot away, as it had done with so many other Weft across the systems they had colonised. Then the dreams had come. Terrifying things. Visions that appeared in his mind like a violation when he rested. To the Weft there was no such thing as a sub-conscious. It was only through the Weft’s contact with other races that Dal had even found out about the concept of dreaming.

The visions were showing him how to build something, an array. A machine capable of aping their naturally entangled state. Normally, the death of the shadow-self meant expulsion from the upper-echelons of the science caste, but when the Weft on Prime had risen up and killed the Pleasure’s Juicers – enhanced slave warriors created by the Pleasure from the Weft’s own science-military forces – the Weft knew that the Pleasure would react. They would have to, in case other species decided to follow the Weft’s lead. The science council became desperate. They had listened to him. Spurred on by the visions, he had not only managed to create the array, but he had found a way to both power and protect the device. There would be a cost. At some level, Dal appreciated the irony. Since he had lost his ‘soul’ he had become a better scientist.

Now all they needed was some time. The footage of the destruction of the Weft fleet, the footage of the fire in the sky, and the destruction of the orbital defence network, all suggested that they did not have the time. Dal spared a glance up at the array as he rapidly gave the control systems verbal instructions. He knew that hundreds of miles beneath him injectors were adding more fuel to the planet’s burning core. To get this right they would need to harvest not just the core’s current energy but as much of the core’s potential energy as they could force out of it.

All the screens and comms devices that had been showing the battle playing out in force and light thousands of miles above them suddenly switched to a figure of the Pleasure’s spokesperson. Not for the first time Dal admired the mathematics of the Pleasure’s fake Weft physiology. The creature started to speak in the Weft’s verbal language.

‘The demand in Weft systems for our products proves that what we supply is what you truly want. You are not attacking us, you are attacking yourselves, your own desires, but there is a price to pay for declaring war on commerce.’ Then the screens went blank.

‘Raise the shields,’ Dal whispered to the control systems, cursing the slowness of verbal communication. There was an audible hum. Dal knew that the electromagnetic forces involved with the coherent energy shield would probably give them all cancer, but that didn’t matter now. What mattered was the countdown. The amount of time they had before the ridiculous amount of energy required for the shield drained the cold fusion reactor dry. What mattered was whether or not they had enough time.

***

The Pleasure’s capital ship, along with its two main ancillary craft and their many drones, had engloballed the Weft home-world. The bright ruby red of high-energy lasers, and the white light of fusion lances, stabbed down from orbit to the surface of the world. Tight, focused beams burnt deep into the crust of the planet and through the molecularly-bonded composite walls of the shelters that the majority of the population were hidden in. They weren’t large holes. Just big enough for the smart bullets to travel through. Bullets programmed with the names, DNA and electro-chemical signatures of a tenth of the planet’s population.

The Weft watched helplessly as their friends died, as their mates died, as their younglings died. There was no panic. The Weft didn’t panic. There was just great sadness and a feeling of helplessness.

***

Something’s wrong, the Enforcer thought. The Face glanced over at him quizzically. Information on two of the Weft who had been sentenced to die appeared in the Face’s mind. They live.

So?

They shouldn’t.

The Face reviewed the data. Both of the living targets’ smart bullets had encountered some kind of barrier. Even assistance from lasers and fusion lances fired from orbit hadn’t helped.

Let them live. Two do not matter. Nobody will know they were targeted. It will not affect the lesson, the Face thought. The Enforcer looked less than convinced.

They should have nothing that can stop the smart bullets. This is defiance.

Are they in the same place?

The Enforcer nodded. I’m launching a seedpod.

The Face gave the mental equivalent of a sigh.

***

Each Pleasure operation had their favoured Juicers. Normally a template taken from the warrior caste of one of the worlds they had subjugated. These warriors were then addicted to and controlled by chemicals. They were also chemically and technologically enhanced by their new masters.

The Pleasure’s capital ship fired a modified smart munition much larger than the smart bullets. Fusion lances stabbed down from orbit to cut a hole, clearing a way to the barrier that two of the smart bullets had found. The seedpod was surrounded by a corona of fire as it made entry. It fell through the planet’s polluted atmosphere. It travelled through the glass-lined tunnel of fused earth, made by the fusion lances, into a large cavern that had been extensively reinforced and armoured. In the cavern was a heavily armoured, dome-shaped structure. Two counter-rotating arcs spun around the dome structure, apparently generating the energy field that was protecting the building.

The seedpod exploded like a sporing fungus. The picotech template seeds started feeding on the surrounding matter, transforming it, allowing the Juicers to build themselves. They were a silicon-based life form. A machine race. They had reached the singularity and their biological creators had transferred their consciousness into machinery and turned their back on flesh and biology once and for all.

Then the Pleasure had come, providing them with narcotic software programs. They had traded the programs from a nihilistic species whom they had provided with necrotising pleasure virals. The virals had led to that race’s eventual extinction. The narcotic software had soon enslaved the machine people.

They grew from the floor, the wall, the roofs and the supports of the cavern. They dragged themselves and their weapons free of the birthing matter, weakening it as the Weft security force responded.

In their weaponised form, the machine Juicers’ silicon skins were razor sharp. Just brushing against them opened flesh. Their personal defence shields sparked as rounds from Weft firearms disintegrated against them. Lightning arced from the shields to hit those who got too close to the Juicers. The Weft soldiers hit by the lightning exploded into lumps of steaming, cooked meat.

The Juicers brought their railguns to bear. Their shields flickered, modulating with the railguns to let the rapidly firing hypersonic rounds out through the flickering. . .